|
I am not a …
Fear factor: 44 percent of Americans queried in Cornell national poll favor curtailing some liberties for Muslim Americans
In a study to determine how much the public fears terrorism, almost half of respondents polled nationally said they believe the U.S. government should — in some way — curtail civil liberties for Muslim Americans…
…
Conversely, 48 percent of respondents nationally said they do not believe that civil liberties for Muslim Americans should be restricted.
…
[Professor] Shanahan notes: ".. our findings highlight that personal religiosity as well as exposure to news media are two important correlates of support for restrictions. We need to explore why these two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than understanding."
Also from the study (PDF):
In November, 2004 37% of respondents believe a terrorist attack within the next 12 months is likely, compared to 90% in November 2002.
Nearly half (47%) of respondents support greater power for the government to monitor Internet activities, while nearly two‐thirds (63%) agree that the government should be able to detain indefinitely suspected terrorists.
As now only 37% expect a terror attack, contrarian thinking lets me believe that there is one right around the corner. Even a small incident, propagandated as Muslim terror through the news media, would put the majority in the US into a very dangerous mood.
Time to recapitulate:
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
…
”
The discussion, which took place during the high tide of zhdanovism and lysenkoism in the world communist movement and the Soviet campaign against cosmopolitanism, revealed more about the state of British marxism in its time under the pressure of these events than about Caudwell. Caudwell’s emphasis on genetics was one of the reasons why he posthumously ran into so much trouble at this time. Even his most severe critics, however, could not help but acknowledge his originality and brilliance. In the course of the discussion, there were those who came to his defense. Various contributors, particularly George Thomson and Alick West, answered the attacks fairly capably.
However, even Caudwell’s most devoted defenders, however appreciative of his insights and aware of his profundity, have tended to see his importance for them primarily as a home product and haven’t fully grasped his importance within the development of marxist philosophy as a whole. Those on both sides have made far too much of Haldane’s ‘quarry of ideas’ metaphor, probably far more than Haldane intended by it, missing Caudwell’s essential contribution, which was a tightly constructed and unified analysis of the nature of bourgeois culture and the socialist alternative. He has been interpreted too randomly, as a source of insights rather than as the bearer of a coherent world view.
The years have passed with his philosophical contribution falling into oblivion. Even in an article giving a rather astute analysis of the tradition of British marxism in relation to science, which actually rapped the knuckles of contemporary British marxists for their neglect of this tradition, Hilary and Steven Rose never mentioned Caudwell. Calling for a revival of discussion of the theme of bourgeois versus socialist science, opened in Britain by Hessen and effectively closed by Lysenko, they stated that British marxists in the 1930s never unravelled the argument, obviously ignorant of Caudwell’s contribution in this domain.
Now and then, someone remembers, but almost entirely in terms of literary theory. David Margolies’s study of Caudwell’s aesthetics was appreciative, but left the impression that the central focus of Caudwell was a theory of the social function of literature. His central focus, I believe, was Weltanschauung and his interest in literature fell into place around this. Francis Mulhern’s analysis of Caudwell tried to see his literary theory more in terms of its underlying philosophy. Something of Caudwell managed sporadically to break though a screen of althusserian misinterpretation, and what basically came out of it was: ‘Christopher Caudwell is an historicist, but not every historicist is Christopher Caudwell’. The New Left Review was to swing even wider off the mark with Terry Eagleton’s passing dismissal of Caudwell, summed up in the conclusion that there is ‘little, except negatively, to be learned from him’. Caudwell’s work was written off as stalinist, idealist, speculative, erratic, ‘bereft of a theory of the superstructure’, ‘punctuated by hectic forays into and out of alien territories’ and ‘strewn with hair-raising theoretical vulgarities’.
A breath of fresh air came with EP Thompson’s attempt to settle his intellectual accounts with Caudwell. It was an extremely perceptive and constructive analysis of Caudwell’s work as a whole, which said many things that had been crying out to be said. He sought to highlight what were Caudwell’s most central and creative preoccupations, which he rightly noted have been misunderstood by younger marxists. Insisting that Caudwell’s work was more significant than had been realised, with its impulse not yet exhausted, Thompson suggesed a new way into the evaluation of Caudwell.
He proposed seeing Caudwell as an anatomist of ideologies, as brilliantly laying bare the deep structure of the characteristic illusions of the epoch, as analysing the generation of modes of intellectual self-mystification. It was, Thompson asserted, a brave, even promethean, venture: to effect a rupture with a whole received world view. It was ‘the most heroic effort of any British marxist to think his own intellectual time’. Caudwell was walking abroad in his world, encountering the largest ideas and issues and not retreating into the introverted security where marxists existed in a universe of self-validating texts. What resulted from his efforts was, in Thompson’s opinion, a body of thought that was more interesting, more complex and more heretical than has been supposed. In refusing the orthodox closures offered by reflection theory and the base/superstructure model, Caudwell was opening the door to a more creative tradition. Thompson was far from uncritical of Caudwell, however, but considered his thought of such extraordinary vitality and relevance that it presented itself for a renewed interrogation.
To appreciate Caudwell’s full stature as a marxist thinker, he should not be seen simply as a source for random insights, but as a philosopher who made an original and highly integrated contribution to the development of marxist philosophy that has yet to be grasped and assimilated by other marxists.
In terms of the problematic of this book, that is, the conjuncture of science, philosophy, and politics within marxism, Caudwell offered a most highly developed position illuminating the interrelations. His was a most tightly constructed and plausible argument, analysing the variety of ways these spheres have converged historically, focusing on the chaos of the later bourgeois period and on the new integration that must be effected by marxists.”
helena sheehan
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 21 2004 21:25 utc | 107
University College Dublin, Ireland
————————————————————————
George Thomson and Ancient Greece
Richard Seaford
University of Exeter
How did drama come into being? How did abstract thought come into being? These are just two of the many topics to which George Thomson made a massive contribution. They are, it seems to me, of great interest, and of importance to the understanding of ourselves. For the answers to them the study of Ancient Greece is essential. And yet nowadays they are, along with other such basic questions, almost never even asked by professional Hellenists, who, if challenged, would mostly reply that the answers to them must be mere speculation.
That reply would be mistaken. But it would in fact not be the real reason why such questions are not asked. Anyone familiar with classical scholarship knows that speculation is what it is doing most of the time: speculation in classical scholarship is respectable enough, but only if it is empirical and contained within narrow limits. The real reasons why such questions are not asked are firstly that they are difficult – to be more precise, they require the combination of skills which Thomson had but with the advance of over-specialisation is increasingly rare -, and secondly that the questions cannot be answered other than by exploration of the socio-historical process by which abstract thought and drama were produced, and that is the kind of understanding – of the relationship between society and its cultural products – from which most Hellenists instinctively recoil, whether in Ancient Greece or in their own society.
Now the two questions I have selected are not merely historical ones. Greek philosophy and Greek drama reached a very high level surprisingly soon after their first appearance. They have certain characteristics (for example, the interplay of opposites in presocratic philosophy, or the centrality of suffering in tragedy) which have been so influential that we take them for granted. Thomson showed how these and other specific qualities of the earliest philosophy and drama cannot be understood without consideration of how philosophy and drama came into being. In both cases what he has revealed is the effect of social change on certain patterns of myth or ritual.
Now here it is sometimes objected not just that these origins are unknowable but that they are irrelevant. After all, it is said, even if it could be shown how philosophy derives from myth or drama from ritual, philosophy is not myth and drama is not ritual. This objection is, of course, a denial of dialectics, and may take the form of an oddly self-limiting pride in an exclusively synchronic perspective. Of course tragedy is not ritual; it is ritual transformed into something else, just as presocratic philosophy is not mythical thought but mythical thought transformed into something else. Thomson is never reductionist. But the something else is not entirely other than what it is transformed from; and its specific nature cannot be understood in ignorance of its origin.
After this rather abstract opening, let us look at a concrete example of Thomson at work, not on the origins of tragedy (a question too complex even to summarise here), but on the role of the Furies in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The Oresteia dramatises the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Klytaimnestra in league with her paramour Aigisthos and the consequent revenge murder of Klytaimnestra and Aigisthos by Agamemnon’s son Orestes. For this matricide Orestes is persecuted by the Furies. He fails to shake them off by purifying himself at the Delphic shrine of his protector Apollo, and so he goes to Athens, where Athena, asked to arbitrate the conflict between Orestes and the Furies, sets up a court of law, the Areopagus, which after hearing the case narrowly acquits Orestes. The anger of the Furies at this verdict seems to threaten the well-being of Athens. But they are persuaded by Athena to accept a place of honour in the city, and the drama ends with the Furies singing blessings on Athens and with a torchlit procession reminiscent of the great Athenian festival of the Panathenaia.
What is the significance of this trial scene and of its result? According to Professor Page, ‘the trial-scene itself is, and surely seemed to its audience, rather weak; but its faults might be excused as congenital to its purely antiquarian purpose’. This comment exemplifies superbly the complete absence of historical imagination. Page cannot appreciate the drama because he cannot understand it. There is no time here to present Thomson’s exposition of the social significance of the issues raised in the trial scene. Our concern is with the Furies. What do they stand for? What is the significance of their agreement to arbitration, which results in the first ever trial by a court? What is the significance of their defeat, and of the honour nevertheless accorded them? Questions such as these, which derive from within the confines of the text itself, led Thomson outwards and backwards.
The Athenians believed that their city had civilised the rest of Greece by the practice of settling homicide cases by reason, in the law court, rather than by violence; and that in general it was by the power of persuasion that men founded cities and laid down laws. Putting it somewhat differently, we can say that the development of a central judicial institution is a key factor in the development of the state. We take it for granted that murder is dealt with by the state. But we learn from ethnology that where the state is weak, or does not exist, there may be various other methods, including the vendetta, the curse (especially if the killer is from within the clan), and purification. Ethnology helped Thomson to see that the Furies are in origin curses within the kinship group of a matrilineal society. It helped him to see why they wear snakes in their hair – as embodying the dead. And it helped him to explain their close relationship with the (female) Fates, the Moirai, and so on. In fact the Furies turn out to be just one example of how Greek religion and culture can be illuminated by the study of pre-state societies. And Thomson did have knowledge of a pre-state culture from the inside, as the culture of the Blasket islands was in effect such a culture.
But what we see in archaic and classical Greek history is the development of the state, the city-state, often at the expense of kinship relations. And what we see in the Oresteia is the encapsulation of a historical transition, the creation of a central judicial institution to resolve a contradiction which could not be resolved by existing methods: vendetta, purification, the curse. This transition is, in two respects, organic. Firstly, the creation of the court emerges naturally from the situation; both sides agree to the arbitration of Athena. And secondly, the old order, represented by the Furies, is incorporated dialectically into the new: the place of honour granted to the Furies, by which they are persuaded to change their anger to good will, represents the persistence, in a less specific form, of the fear they inspired in the old order. In general, beneath the Olympian religion of the city-state, we find a network of belief and cult persisting from earlier forms of social organisation.
This example illustrates three points.
(1) Thomson acquired his theoretical understanding by working outwards from the ancient material. His starting point was not theory but rather the insolubility, within traditional methodological limits, of certain problems thrown up by the material itself.
(2) The contradictions present in the text can be understood only from a diachronic, a historical perspective. And
(3) Aeschylus himself, and so no doubt also the Athenians, were conscious of the process by which the ancient function of the Furies was not simply rejected but, with the resolution of the contradiction between themselves and Orestes, transformed into something new. Thomson was such a powerful interpreter of Aeschylus partly because he shared this dialectical element of his outlook.
Thomson was not of course the first to use anthropology in the study of Ancient Greece. This brings me to the question of his relationship to his predecessors. In various respects Thomson succeeded to the so-called Cambridge School of Hellenists, of whom the most important were Jane Harrison and F.M. Cornford. The work of Jane Harrison on Greek religion was a synthesis of the new material provided by the recent rapid development of ethnology and of archaeology with the advances in the understanding of the relationship between religion and society provided by Durkheim. ‘In the present enquiry’, she wrote of her book Themis, ‘we shall at the outset attempt no definition of the term religious, but we shall collect the facts that admittedly are religious and see from what human activities they appear to have sprung’. This, together with the Durkheimian principle that ‘religious representation arises from collective action and emotion’ was a radical development in the study of the similarities between Greek religion and the religion of tribal societies. Another consequence was the privileged place now given to ritual as a source of religious representation. Ritual is social, collective activity, but also bears significations which may issue into art, literature, even philosophy. Much of Greek literature, mythology, and religious representation generally was given a source ritual, which itself derives, anthropology confirmed, from the social and material needs of society.
The extension of this method from Greek religion to early Greek philosophy was one of the achievements of F.M. Cornford. In particular, he demonstrated that the basic assumptions of the earliest Greek cosmology derive from a myth about the origins of the cosmos that we find in Hesiod’s Theogony and which itself derives ultimately from a ritual, not a Greek ritual but a near-Eastern one, the Babylonian new-year ceremony.
Now it is at this point that the problem of the relationship between Greek culture and so-called ‘primitive’ cultures becomes acute. The tendency of the Cambridge school was to expose the roots of Greek culture in ritual and in ‘primitive’ culture generally, and thereby to dispel as illusory the miraculous singularity of the Greeks. And yet, of course, the Greeks were, after all, in many important respects singular. For example, in the development of the kind of abstract thinking we call philosophy, or in the creation of tragedy. For the understanding of such important developments ethnology and Durkheim are necessary, but not sufficient. The Cambridge school was unable to explain fundamental change. Robert Browning has described Jane Harrison as unhistorical. Here again, Thomson located in the subject as he found it a basic problem which could not be solved within the confines of the subject, but only by broadening its scope still further. Here again, Marxism was not simply brought to bear on the material. Rather, Thomson was brought by the material, and through his ability to ask basic questions, to Marxism. This is a complex point, which I will attempt nevertheless to illustrate briefly.
Greek philosophy developed out of myths about the origin of the world. It did so in part by a process of depersonalisation. The Earth, the Sky, the Sea, etc. cease to be gods and goddesses, and become elements: earth, air, water, etc., whose role and position in the world is explained no longer by anthropomorphic activity but by their own qualities: earth is where it is because it is heavy, and so on.
Then, with the philosopher Anaximenes we find the idea that all the elements are in fact forms of one single element, air, which acquires its different forms by being more or less compact; in its rarefied form it is fire, in its dense form it is earth, and so on. That is to say, Anaximenes explained qualitative difference by reducing it to quantitative difference: the apparently qualitative difference between, say, earth and air is in fact just a matter of different quantities of air in the same space. This tendency to reduce quality to quantity, which is also a tendency towards greater abstraction, is taken further by Pythagoras, for whom the world was actually composed of numbers, and by Herakleitos, for whom the elements were successive transformations of fire, with fire being also in some sense identical with the logos, an abstract principle controlling the whole process.
Both Pythagoras and Herakleitos represent, each in his different way, not only the reduction of quality to quantity but also the tendency to separate a privileged abstraction (number, the logos) from the concrete. These tendencies are taken still further by Parmenides, who (paradoxically) denied true reality to everything except what he called ‘the one’, an entity from which he tried to exclude all perceptible qualities. And this prepares the way for Plato’s Theory of Forms, in which actual tables are less real than the idea of a table. We have then a progressive stripping away of qualitative differentiation from what constitutes the world, together with a progressive separation of a privileged abstraction from the perceptible world.
Thomson not only made sense of the development of Greek Philosophy in these terms. He also explained it. The period of this intellectual development is also the period of the first development of commodity production and a monetary economy. In terms of what it will fetch at the market, one commodity is no different from another. All commodities may, in so far as they have an exchange value, be reduced to abstract, numerical terms. They may all be expressed in terms of the universal equivalent, money. The tendency of production for the market is therefore to strip away, in the minds of men, all qualitative differentiation from what is produced. Moreover, money is a privileged, dominant abstraction, separate from the apparently various commodities into all of which it may be transformed. The analogies with the contemporaneous development of Greek philosophy are striking.
Thomson both pointed out the analogies and also showed, by exploring the relation of the philosophers to their changing society, that the analogies are not coincidental, that the changing conception of the world was determined by economic and social change. And he went on to analyse comparable determinations in ancient Israel and in ancient China.
But this does not mean that he regarded the development of the economy as the only factor. Take, for example, his demonstration that the famous antithetical style of Herakleitos derives from ritual, from the mysteries (since strikingly confirmed by archaeological discovery). Much of the content too of Herakleitos’ philosophy, notably the idea of the fiery soul undergoing successive changes into various elements, also derives from the mysteries, from the mystic doctrine of the journey of the soul through the elements. Such discoveries are still within the perspective of Cornford. But Herakleitos’ philosophy is not merely mystic doctrine, it is mystic doctrine transformed into something else, more abstract, transformed by preconceptions derived from a monetary economy and the circulation of commodities. As Herakleitos himself put it, ‘all things are exchanged for fire and fire for all things as goods are exchanged for gold and gold for goods’.
In the same way, whereas Gilbert Murray, another member of the Cambridge School, had argued for the origins of tragedy in ritual, it was left to Thomson both to tighten up the argument and to explain the development as product of the democratic city-state.
The Cambridge school achieved an ambitious synthesis of traditional scholarship with recent developments in archaeology, ethnology, and sociology. Thomson transformed this synthesis by extending its scope still further; his work represents the culmination of the Cambridge school. Thereafter, despite the potential for exciting new advances and the persistence of public interest, there has, it seems to me, been an overall decline in the subject. Specialised advances have occurred without the synthesis which alone gives those advances value. Worse, even the need for synthesis is often ignored or rejected. It may seem paradoxical that whereas Thomson represents the culmination of the best tradition of Greek studies in this country, today’s dominant classicist mind-set in our universities represents the rejection of this tradition, or rather, if that implies too great a degree of conscious choice, it represents the persistence of a mid-Victorian mentality, as if all the theoretical advances made since then had never occurred. Current classical scholarship is on the whole capable neither of confirming nor of refuting the work of Thomson. It is just one indication of the quaint myopia of the classical establishment in this country that the man who, quite apart from his contributions in other fields, was the greatest Hellenist of his generation was not even made a Fellow of the British Academy.
Of Thomson’s contribution to Ancient Greek studies I have of course been limited to a tiny sample, chosen to illustrate firstly the dialectical development of Greek culture, secondly the reflection of this dialectic in the consciousness of the Greeks themselves, and thirdly the dialectical relationship of Thomson himself to the tradition of Greek studies.
In fact his range even within Greek studies is extraordinary: metrics, translation, linguistics, mythology, Homer, kinship, textual criticism, and so on. I will end with a word about just one of these specialisations, textual criticism, the art of restoring what an ancient author wrote by removing the corruptions affecting the text over centuries of transmission from one manuscript to another. I mention textual criticism for two reasons. The first is that, here again, the key to his success is in his development of the best that he found in the tradition, the method elaborated by a contemporary of the Cambridge School, Walter Headlam. The second is this. Greek textual criticism is a discipline with a long tradition (it was first practised in antiquity), and may seem very limited in scope, requiring nothing more than knowledge of Ancient Greek, of the author’s style, and of the relationship between the various surviving manuscripts of the author. And indeed, it is practised in this narrow way even today by many of its leading practitioners. But what Headlam and Thomson showed was the necessity of also reconstructing the social and intellectual context in which Aeschylus wrote, of detecting in Aeschylus allusions to traditional ideas which might reappear in much later authors, of knowing the history of Greek throughout the period of manuscript transmission so as to understand the kinds of error likely to occur in copying, and so on. Once again, the problems themselves force us outwards beyond the limits of the traditional method. If we compare Thomson’s edition of Aeschylus with those (by Fraenkel, and by Page) I was set as a student to read, we find that time and time again Thomson has the right reading and they have the wrong one. One of the many things they failed to learn from him is that you cannot succeed even in the specialisation of textual criticism if you are only a textual critic. Another is that you cannot be a great Hellenist if you are only a Hellenist.
Note
This paper was originally delivered at the conference on the life and work of George Thomson held at the University of Birmingham, 7/1/1989. [For further information on George Thomson’s Irish connections see Seán O Lúing’s article, ‘George Thomson’ in Classics Ireland vol 3 1996, pp.141-162 – Ed.]
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 21 2004 21:31 utc | 108
G.E.M. de Ste Croix, Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, London 1981.
* Aristotle, Politics (Penguin)
Critical Works
* Barnes, J., Schofield M., and Sorabji, R. (edd.), Articles on Aristotle, vol 2: Ethics and Politics, London 1977.
* Baynes, N.H., ‘The decline of the Roman power in Western Europe’ Journal of Roman Studies 22, 1943, 29-35.
* Beard, M. and Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic, 2nd ed., London 1999.
* Brunt, P.A., ‘The army and the land in the Roman Revolution’, Journal of Roman Studies 52, 1962, 229-232.
* Brunt, P.A., ‘The Roman mob’, Past & Present 35, 1966, 3-27.
* Burford, Alison, Land and Labor in the Greek World, London 1993.
* Cartledge, P., The Greeks, Oxford 1993.
* Cartledge, P., Cohen EE and Foxhall, L., Money, Labour and Land: approaches to the economies of Greece, London 2002.
* Davies, J.K., Democracy & Classical Greece, 1978.
* Finley, M.I., Slavery in Classical Antiquity: views and controversies, Cambridge 1960.
* Finley, M.I. (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society, London 1974.
* Finley, M. I., Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, Harmondsworth 1980.
* Finley, M. I., Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, Harmondsworth 1981.
* Finley, M. I., The ancient economy, London 1973.
* Forrest, Early Greek Democracy
* Frank, R.I., ‘Marxism and ancient history’ PC SU.
* Garnsey, P.D.A., & Whittaker, C.R., Imperialism in the Ancient World, Cambridge 1978.
* Garnsey, P., ‘Aspects of the decline of the urban aristocracy in the Empire, in ANRW II.1 (1974) 229-252.
* Harris, W.V., War & Imperialism in Republican Rome 327-70 BC, Oxford 1979.
* Jones, A.H.M., The Later Roman Empire, Oxford 1964.
* Jones, A.H.M., Athenian Democracy, Oxford 1957.
* Jones, A.H.M., The Roman Economy, Oxford 1974.
* Jones, A.H.M., The Decline of the Ancient World, London 1975.
* Konstan, D., ‘Marxism and Slavery’ PC in S.U.
* McKeown, Niall ‘Some thoughts on Marxism and Ancient Greek History’ PC SU.
* Padgug, R ‘Classes and society in classical Greece’ PC SU.
* Powell, A., The Greek World, 1995.
* Ste Croix, G. E. M. de, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, London 1972.
* Walbank, F., The Awful Revolution: the decline of the Roman Empire in the West, Liverpool 1969.
* Wheeler, M. ‘Aristotle’s analysis of the nature of political struggle’ in J. Barnes, M. Schofield and R. Sorabji (edd.), Articles on Aristotle, vol. 2
* Wood, N., Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, Univ. of California Press 1988.
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 21 2004 22:01 utc | 112
Cunning [and no jokes about linguists, please, or track teams] has for me overtones richer and more ambivalent than simple “ingenuity” or “cleverness”. A degree of “deception” is implicit, at least in modern parlance. I believe that a contemporary of Shakespeare could have referred to a “cunning artificer” and meant nothing more than “skilled or ingenious”, but by C20 the word had acquired overtones of the kind of cleverness that succeeds by disadvantaging or “conning” some other interest or person.
So what I meant by “violence or cunning” was the division of labour in the Mafia: “violence” is the dirty end of the business, where the button-men actually go out and shoot, kidnap, torture or merely threaten potential competitors or disobedient customers; “cunning” is the amoral acumen of commerce, the particular talent (as real and vibrant as an ear for music or an eye for colour and form) that sees immediately the “edge” or advantage in every situation and goes for it without reservation or moral qualm. I believe that a brilliant mercantilist can “see” whole power structures and “deals”, no matter how complex, in the way that a good engineer can “see” the stresses and weak points of a bridge or building and a good sailor can “see” the air pressure in the sails and rigging or read the surface of water. The brilliant mercantilist immediately sees the most advantageous path through this structure, every juncture at which a rival or competitor can be defeated or deceived, and plans accordingly. Are brilliant mercantilists also good chess players? I wouldn’t be surprised, though they might lack the requisite enthusiasm for any activity that did not result immediately in money, sex, and/or the humiliation of some other person; people with a serious jones for Winning tend to like tangible rewards.
An old Communist bromide was that capitalists and rentiers have no skills, no abilities, no talents, they just batten on the abilities of others. As stated above, I disagree. I think cunning is a skill. But the skill of “cunning” like the related skills of violence, requires restraint in a healthy society. If exercised unregulated and for immediate personal gain, it is mere criminality.
The famous old line “It’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business,” is a truism: the Mafia is simply Business — Business in the absence of any regulation that protects the commons and the greater good of the polity. Discpline, regulation, law, accountability and openness are what restrain these native human skills from becoming cancerous, i.e. accreting so much power to their wielders that freedom for all other persons around them is sadly diminished.
There is no difference — morally speaking — between money and muscle, and no difference between the ability to see the sharpest end of a business deal and the ability to know where to plant a punch or kick for the maximum effect. Both are merely a talent for winning in interpersonal conflicts. If unrestrained, these talents when exercised freely result in intimidation, bullying, and slavery for other people less talented, less lucky, or more ethically restrained.
By contrast the talent for making music, painting pictures, being a gracious host, or building bridges, when exercised unrestrained, generally harms no one (except perhaps the neighbour unthrilled by long hours of bagpipe practise or hammering noises). The talent for growing a garden — food, flowers, fruit — may actually benefit an entire community, as may the talent for troubleshooting/diagnosis (whether medical or mechanical). The underrated talents of empathy, understanding, teaching, comforting have enormous value for any community. But the talent for winning produces only two results: a winner with more power, and one or more losers with less power.
I think the talent for winning (cunning) can be channelled into constructive purposes. Project management (seeking the optimum path through a complex timeline and tackling/resolving all obstructions/difficulties) for example might be a constructive application of this ability. But we see from the history of many big projects that the basic Gotta Win impulse often takes over, resulting in gross abuses towards people perceived as “getting in the way” of a big project, or in vicious internal political struggles that vitiate the project’s original purpose, or in outright embezzlement and misdirection of the project. People with the talents of cunning and of violence are a dangerous resource. Our species wouldn’t be what we are without ’em, and yet their gifts are inherently dangerous to ideals like democracy and freedom. imho the essential conundrum of Government is that its purpose is to restrain and regulate the exercise of these dangerous talents, for the sake of liberty, peace, and order — and yet the nature of government is such that it inevitably attracts the very type of Cunningly-gifted persons who tend to undermine and defeat that purpose.
My own talents are artisanal, I’m rather deficient in cunning 🙂
@slothrop, of course Pat is f-ing with you. everyone needs a hobby 🙂 besides, captious rhetorical poking and prodding (picador stuff) is a textbook tactic when defending a weak position. it’s guerrilla warfare applied to the clash of ideas — dart about stinging here and there, but never engage directly with heavier forces 🙂
Posted by: DeAnander | Dec 22 2004 18:35 utc | 135
|
